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An interesting discussion again gents. One of my concerns with companies is when the develop games for a third party IP often at the expense of their own. A few points; Spartan games had strong IPs but it started with the HALO IP threw a lot of money at it .. withdrew from some of there classics .. they over capitalised wentb under and their creditors couldn’t even sell their HALO stuff to pay the bills because it was someone elses IP.
With Mantic (a company I love and support) I like the Mantica and Warpath IPs but they have been neglected for Walking dead (whivh frankly I’m not ar$ed about and now Hellboy) they have covered their investment but all it takes is the IP holders to withdraw support and they are laft with nothing on their years of investment.
Steamforged has me worried, I love Guild Ball and interested in Godtear and now two IPs from outside and over the last 6 months there stuff doesn’t seem as focussed.
With Fantasy Flight a lot of there time has been reccently put into the Star Wars IP at the expense of the IPs they own. Now I get Star Wars is a licence to print money but they are going to lose a metric $hit load is disney revokes the licence.

As a gamer and as Warren rightly points out a collector, I like an IP that is fleshed out AND has a range of models within MY army (oh who am I kidding, armies) to collect. At the moment in the smaller companies a lot of these ranges have holes in them and yes it does annoy me to see the compny flitting off to something else, before doing “right” by their original games. Just my opinion I may be wrong (but I don’t buy anything from CMON because it is just one new thing after another and none of them have depth enough to appeal to me)

love how you only waited two minutes there haha. it’ll take most people longer than two minutes to read, digest and then respond to your post.

The thing I have with companies with many games (for me Mantic and FFG) is that I don’t get invested in all of them (thank god!) and then find myself losing interest in them.
The walking dead for example is one of the finest story telling games for a small band of figures I’ve played in years, ripe for house rules and mucking around with. sadly however I haven’t played enough of it because the hype around it has died and mantic have turned their attention to something else. possibly they’re winding it up, I don’t know but I don’t get the feeling its being pushed so hard. it strikes me as a kickstarter ‘rolling gap filer’.

FFG do Star Wars. lots of it, have so many games for it, imperial assault, destiny, xwing, armada, legion, roleplaying in 3 flavours and that’s just the main Star Wars games they have, obviously there are other games. they have reached a point whereby they are constantly irritating one player base (usually IA or Armada) by giving them no news, no releases, no articles for months at a time. I think armada has had the longest stretch of silence at 9 months or something ridiculous. When FFG employs its usual ruthless BUY BUY BUY tactics of aggressive marketing and selling people get worried when there is radio silence. I think that now, there are too many Star Wars games doing similar (yet different) things and as such as a whole the juggling act is starting to come apart. the Legion release and Xwing rerelease have taken a lot of resources to achieve and they don’t have the in-house manufacturing like GW do so its hard for them to deliver everything they promised as they promised. they’ve been caught out before on this model.

Just by way of explanation, I’m not quite that impatient 😉 … I finished watching the video … typing up my coment as I went … posted it …. It was now about an hour and a half since the xlbs went live … and I thought .. I know , I’ll go and read other people’s reactions, happy sundays etc. and there was nothing (aside from Warren’s cheery greeting) … just me posting 3 times….I felt a bit alone *lip quivers* …. I honestly wan’t expecting a reaction to my post in 2 minutes .. honest… 🙂

I think any company needs to develop and maintain their own IP as a baseline to securing their own future. Going into licenced ip’s can be lucrative but fickle. GW did great with LOTR until the trilogy ran out then sales slumped hard. But they had 40k/WFB underpinning the company.

Knight Models on the other hand are a company built on licencing and would very likely go broke in a few months if they ever lost their DC licence. I don’t see them ever going into plastics for this very reason.

I think prodos saw the bright lights of a Hollywood IP and went in on AvP, granted they messed it up, but Warzone suffered a great deal from them turning their attention to AvP and now they lost the license and are starting from scratch with a wholly original IP.

Have Game Companies Lost Their Focus?
No, I don’t believe they have. Their focus is to get as much money from our wallets, as quickly as they can, for the least amount of outlay.

Quite frankly @warzan nothing is going to compete with 40K.
The company has such a head start over its competition, having existed for longer than most, employee count is probably higher, etc.
40k’s history covers more time than humans have existed.
There are more Black Library books than I can count – I included the Horus Heresy here.
There are more YouTube channels dedicated, or at least partly so, to 40K than perhaps any other game.

DnD might be giving it a run for its money now with 5th ed being so hot, but it has to overcome the split at 4th ed and Pathfinder. But it doesn’t require miniatures to play.

Happy Sunday, I´ve to say I don´t like this Shotgun design from companies. If they couldn´t focus on one IP, how could we? You can´t build a communitie without a good IP wich keeps you interessted in the game.

That’s an interesting thought – are gaming communities built around a single game?
In my experience perhaps initially yes, but they soon magpie (“oooh look shinney”) to the next hot thing when interest wanes.
Not everyone migrates to the same thing.

I know one person that has stuck with playing a particular edition of the WRG Napoleonic rules at 1/72nd scale, but the number of opponents he has has greatly reduced over the years.

Beast of War initially seemed to come together over GW products, but look at where they are now…

“If they couldn’t focus on one IP, how could we?”
From the companies’ POV they could be looking at the players lack of attention-span (shiny syndrome) and say, ” If you can’t focus on one IP, why should we?”

Yeah, as long as there are people like me who will go all out on the latest Kickstarter before I’ve even opened the one I backed 2 years ago and just received last week, it’s in their best interest to come out with new things. Wild West Exodus, for example, have come out with a lot of great new centerpieces, the likes of which Warren is talking about, but I haven’t gotten them since I haven’t actually played the game yet.

I think the “shotgun” effect is partly due to Kickstarters (where you basically design a small self contained game and release ALL the miniatures in the one push), after you’ve done that one….where do you go?

This in itself however these days can turn players away. For example Mantic did Mars Attacks, but a year later it was pretty much dropped and all that was left was the leavings on the warehouse shelves. Walking Dead sounds like it been more of a permanent product, but remember each “wave” is usually only about a dozen new sculpts.

Companies that don’t use KS to push their sales/marketing such as warlord start of a game with initially a smaller range at launch, but gradually add to the existing range each month. But this also allows them to compliment the miniatures with “other” products. For example Gate of Antares now has five (I think) narrative campaign books. They’ve also been slowly releasing the tanks for the game bit by bit (so it seems the game is growing and the company has it’s eye on the ball…..but will probably release the same amount of sculpts as one of the major KS schemes).

I don’t think you can count historicals as an IP however, as this differs in that there’s no exclusivity to this “IP”. Most historical wargamers will use miniatures from differing manufacturers to complete their army if their main “source” doesn’t cover everything. All that matters is the minitures are the same height and the sculpting style is reasonably similar.

A lot of the time companies release schedules are so rapid that games have come and gone before I can even buy them. I see something I’m interested in, think about it, do a bit of research, think some more, then decide to get into it and find the game has gone and is no longer supported.
Even the venerable GW has been guilty with Shadow War and now Shadespire moving to a new iteration. However, because they are tied to their main IP gamers can always recycle the models back into the core armies.

There are a few other games I’d like to collect but they have a restricted range and I have no confidence in them being around in a years time to keep the collection going.

I’ve backed many games on Kickstarter to serve as a replacement for 40K. This was back when GW was doing a lot of things wrong in my opinion. Now, many of those games are dead, and GW is doing a lot better than they were. There are other games that scratch an itch 40K just can’t, but I keep coming back to 40K in some form or another.

I would have expected Star Wars Legion to have made a bigger impact by now and be seriously challenging Warhammer 40k. The IP is the best possible and the game mechanics good, but it is heavily lacking on the collectability front. The sculpts and the production quality is nowhere near GW and to be honest, there is maybe only one truly collectable piece in the range now, the AT-ST. They especially have dropped the ball on the biggest asset of the Star Wars IP, the heroes. All the hero sculpts are mediocre at best.

This is a tough question. When I saw your coverage of Dark Age I absolutely love it.. (Wild West Exodus as well). I cannot find anyone who plays anything non GW or Card games anywhere near me, unless it’s X-Wing (no Armada either). I think companies using the Shotgun method have a good reason to try new stuff they have to create buzz and hope Johnny Consumer sees the new shiney and tries to expand into their other stuff. Another thing is “Old Habits” I have a ton of 40k stuff,so if i’m going to play something it’s probably going to be that. I have seen crews for Malifaux but I’ve never seen anyone play it. Gaslands was HUGE when it came out yet I’ve never seen a single game played. I have the rulebook for it but haven’t gotten through it yet.. You have to create a buzz..an event to stay afloat.
Keep in mind I live on the West Coast of the US, so my vision may be tainted by location

Happy Sunday! How about some of the board game team return for the next one.
On to the topic at hand, it is a little strange to see how 40k has been a massive force in the miniature community. I honestly thought that Infinity would have carved out more of the star chart by this point. I have never played Infinity and know only minor elements to the fluff, but the clean designs and tech angle of it has made it at times more appealing to me.

I wonder if the scatter approach is only in result of the cosmos spread of the community. In the earlier days we did not have that many games we know about or even could get a hold of. Now it seems that anyone who has been in the larger companies will one day step away to make their own game and products. This niche market is becoming even thinner from the many more options of games but also with the possibility of the community thinning out due to other gaming avenues, or just leaving the hobby altogether. So wide nets are needed to capture what they can and hope that they stay. Another thing is that it almost seems that warzones are the flavor that is falling out of style. We don’t seem to be getting any of this in the mass media. Its ragtag groups of mercenaries or a band of anti-heroes, not regimented ground pounders.

This is a topic it would be interesting to hear from a game company on. In fact many of the topics require inside insight I think to form a balanced view. I can only really think as a consumer. I wonder if, having raised a topic, discussed it on screen, and got community feedback, it would be feasible to have a Part 2 follow up to some of the topics with one of your industry buddies to get their take on it? I’m sure Alessio, Chris Birch or Hawk Dave would have some very interesting views on this! Heck even get a round table going with them all debating at once. That would make fascinating viewing. I’d pay for a ticket to that!

Maybe there isn’t a big player like 40K because the companies don’t have a change to grow to that scale. It takes time to grow to a scale like 40k, they didn’t start as a mass battle game like they are now.
You have to know that your game is popular and it is being bought enough to take the steps to go bigger and maybe you have to make rules adjustments to go to scale like that and keep supporting the game with releases that every player has something.
There are rules sets out there that allow that and you can see that the company show the intention to go their but maybe the players aren’t interested to do that.
Maybe there will be some that go there like comn: song of ice and fire or Star Wars legion but they are pretty young and the future will tell if they make it.

I imagine very few game companies have the built revenue to just knock stuff out as regularly as people wish them too. Kickstarter has allowed a number of companies to use it as a pre-order platform and that will no doubt continue.

I think GW as a business has so many facets to it that it would be virtually impossible for any other company to catch. Even with IPs such as Star Wars Legion. I think the best chance a company has of becoming GW’s market competitor would be from one of the large plastic kit companies from the scale modelling side. If they were to take on a none historical format using there pre-established assets they may have the chance. It would still need a very good ruleset and an in depth engaging background.

When sales begin to flatline and decline companies will tend to look around for alternatives. Also having all your eggs in one basket is risky, generating products for more than one IP can help in lean times and with the KS format there is a chance to setup without as much outlay. So is it that we are just seeing smarter business models? Why improve if the competition is of a similar standard? Keep the next generation or evolution for when its needed.

I think Asomdee may have surpassed GW in terms of capitalisation, with all of the companies it merge with or bought up.
I seem to remember that the investment firm that created that behemoth were trying to sell it for $1.5 billion, or some such….Don’t think they’ve had a buyer yet.